All wired up….
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… and got the laptop working. Getting around the password was a doddle once I had the right bit of equipment. The contents were singularly unexciting – it seems to have been used as some sort of work computer, but there weren’t any interesting files on it. It had last been accessed over 18 months ago, which reassured me – I’d been worrying that it was stolen, and dumped by the thieves when they couldn’t get past the password. But it’s just an old work computer that’s probably been sitting unloved in somebody’s cupboard ever since the owner got upgraded to a shiny new machine.
It was running Win98, and I tried installing Ubuntu straight over the top. A couple of minutes into the installation, some incomprehensible error messages flashed across the screen and everything locked – I couldn’t even turn it off. Eventually, I pulled the power lead and left it to turn itself off.
Have no idea what the cause of the crash was. Maybe I should have tried a clean install onto a bare drive, or maybe it was a faulty disk – I’d downloaded the disc image from Ubuntu.com and I use very cheap CDs. But I’ve ordered a installation CD from them (they send them out completely free) and I’ll try again with that.
In the meantime, I’ve installed XP, and it’s running beautifully. I’ve even got it networked, though I’ll have to get a second network dongle if I want to run it alongside the PC and share files.
So I’m still moderately cheerful – and eventually I’ll stop looking for the catch.
But they take – like – 10 weeks to send it, don’t they? I have one right here that I just burned – successfully as far as I can tell per the instructions on the website – that I can post to you on Monday if you want. Just say the word. It’s the 7.10 desktop i386 one, yeah? (If you want a different one I can probably do that too).
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